


Sunset

by Think_I_Missed



Category: Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Character Turned Into Vampire, M/M, Vampires
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:34:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27454318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Think_I_Missed/pseuds/Think_I_Missed
Summary: Camping for the first time in the Adirondacks, Tom and his friends are visited by two beautiful, mysterious strangers.The night turns bloody, and Tom, terrified and dying, is visited by what he thinks is an angel.
Relationships: Original Character/Original Character





	Sunset

Sunset

Chapter 1

“See, I told you it was worth it!”  
I didn't look at Rachel as she said that. Normally, I would have rolled my eyes at her. Maybe thrown in a little scoff. Definitely planned out what I could do to I-told-you-so her before the end of the day.  
This time, though... Dammit, she was right.  
The wind in my eyes stung, but I had to keep them open, because I was looking at the greatest view I'd ever seen.  
The world stretched out in front of us, mountains undulating under a blanket of fall colors – a patchwork quilt of reds, oranges, yellows. There was just enough haze in the air to fog up the crisp reality of the landscape, and my brain wasn't quite convinced I wasn't looking at some elaborate mural. The depth didn't look convincing, and yet at the same time I was pretty sure I was seeing clear into Canada.  
“The Rockies can suck it,” Rachel said as she joined me, dropping a flat stone on top of a nearby cairn. “The Adirondacks are where it's at.”  
I didn't answer. I was too busy basking in the feeling that I was literally on top of the world.  
“So,” Rachel answered, nudging my arm. “What do you think, Tom?” Rachel has a tough time keeping quiet and soaking in a moment. She had chattered the entire way up the side of Mount Marcy, while the only thing keeping me from complaining about the climb was the fact that I was always about to pass out. I don't think she's gone more than five minutes in her life without talking. She even talks in her sleep, which makes it so much fun to be her college roommate.   
But hey, when she's right, she's right.  
“Really awesome,” I told her, as I took out my phone to get the full panorama shot. “Though I'm not entirely convinced that I didn't pass out on the climb up, and now my brain is giving me pleasant hallucinations as it shuts down forever.”  
“God, you are such a whiner.” She slapped me in the arm, although it was less of a slap and more of a slide, given how sweaty we both were. But I knew she wasn't too annoyed, because she's actually pretty patient with me.   
“So, is this our only big mountain climb this week?” I asked.  
“Heck no,” she laughed. “There's forty-five more to go. I'm going to try and get you to be at least one-eighth of a forty-sixer by the time the week is over.”  
I groaned. “When you ship my body back to my mother, tell her I died doing something I only sort of tolerated.”  
“Don't worry. You'll be hooked on hiking before the week is over. Then you'll be begging me to drive you out here every other weekend, instead of just begging me to drive you to Tim Horton's.”   
“It's not my fault they've got the only good fast-food bagels. And that you're the one with the car.”  
“Oh, shut up and enjoy the view, Tom,” she said, dragging me to her for a very sweaty selfie (with an admittedly stunning backdrop).   
Once we'd both okayed the photo, Rachel unclipped her backpack and dropped it on the group, plopping down next to it.   
“What are you doing?” I asked. “Don't we climb down now?”  
“Of course not,” she answered, digging through her bag. “Clearly, you still have a lot to learn. Your reward for summiting a mountain isn't just the view.” She pulled a Snickers bar out and tossed it to me. “It's also lunch.”  
“This is acceptable to me,” I said, sitting down next to her. I've got to say, it's a pretty rewarding feeling to be eating on a mountaintop.

Rachel and I had met at school. We both went to Clarkson University, although she'd grown up in the Adirondacks and I'd grown up in downtown Buffalo. Honestly, just driving to the campus freshman year had taken me through more wilderness than I'd ever seen in my life. Just being real: I think I'd much rather deal with the Buffalo Burmese Mafia than with the bears. And yes, I have seen bears out here. Three of them.   
I was a computer engineering student and Rachel was a mechanical engineering student, and we'd met in a robotics class and quickly become close. Which is lucky for me because... Well, let me tell you about Clarkson.  
Yes, it's in the middle of the goddamn woods, but the people who go here aren't all outdoorsy woods women like Rachel. Since it's a STEM school, there are a lot of dudes here. I think the ratio is something like 75-25, men to women. And a lot of the guys here are... Is it still okay to call people “neckbeards?” Not really my type of guy, because I look and act like a theater kid who somehow forgot to actually do theater and spent all his time collecting and dissecting old Tandy computers. I've never once played Magic: The Gathering, and so I don't really belong with any of the usual crowd. And all the other dudes are jocks, which is a weirdly huge culture gap, and you can probably guess from the way I struggled up Mount Marcy that I'm not one of those, either.   
Rachel had a similar issue. She's like if you took a hippie-witch from the woods and gave her a knack for designing machinery. She doesn't fit in well with a lot of the girls in school, because they're either hockey prodigies from Canada, or they're suffering from what Rachel calls “RIBS.” That means “Ratio Induced Bitch Syndrome.” Which is a not very nice way to say that because there's so few girls on campus, they get their pick of the men and it goes to their heads in the worst way.   
So after two years of friendship and two years of her knocking over a dozen hockey sticks each time she entered her dorm room and two years of me trying to keep Dorito dust out of my motherboards, we decided that rooming together would not doom our friendship.   
Unfortunately, she decided that us sharing a quad would mean that it was time for her to drag me into her hobbies.  
Which explains why I am now doing two things I have never seen myself doing before. Hiking up the side of a goddamn mountain, and camping.

Our base camp was made up of five tents split between ten people. Some of them were Rachel's friends, but most of them were friends-of-friends. One of those friends-of-friends, Zach, was the nephew of whoever owned the property we were staying on.  
When Rachel first told me we were going camping over Thanksgiving break, I admit I panicked a little bit. “Aren't their a bunch of hotels in the Adirondacks?” I'd asked. “Can't we just stay in one of those for the week?”  
“Sure,” she said, pulling up a few websites. “Would you like to see the nightly prices during a holiday weekend?”  
And after seeing that, I was forced to choose between going home for the holidays, and dodging questions from my neurotic mother about why I didn't have a girlfriend yet while my father just started at me with a look that told me he knew why and a grip on his beer can that told me he wasn't okay with it or... camping. If I tried to stay in the dorms, Rachel would just tie me up in my sleep and spirit me away to the woods.  
So I camped.  
Well, I guess to be fair, I hadn't actually camped yet. Rachel had woken me up at 5 o'clock, driving me out to the middle of nowhere, strapped a pack on me, laced me up in her brother's hiking shoes, and taken me up Mount Marcy. I have to admit that she knew me and my abilities pretty well, because by the time we'd gone up and come down, we met everyone else at the campsite just as they arrived as well.  
We'd driven down an actual dirt road, turned off on a private driveway, and ended up in a clearing surrounded by aspen trees with bright yellow leaves.   
“You can tell they're aspens because of how their leaves quake,” Rachel told me, as I looked up at the shivering canopy over us. It was beautiful, but my paranoid ass was ready to take is as a warning that even the trees were afraid.  
We parked in a clearing next to two other cars. There were four other people milling around, beginning to set up the campsite. It looked like a fairly established site, with a fire pit and an ancient wooden picnic table.  
Rachel bounded out of the car, waving. “Hey Zach!” she called. “The place looks great!”  
“Yeah,” a scruffy blonde man waved back at her. “We used to camp here all the time when I was a kid.”  
They hugged, and Rachel really snuggled in there, looking over at me and winking. I should have known I was going to be her wingman this week.  
“It's nice to meet you outside of the group chat,” Rachel said pulling away from the hug. “Is Tara here yet?” Tara was the one who had organized the Friendsgiving camping weekend – she knew everyone but me.   
“On her way,” Zach answered. “As far as I know. Though she might have texted me an update that I didn't get, since there's no cell reception out here.”  
“What?” I yelled, bursting out of the car, stumbling because apparently your muscles seize up if you sit for 20 minutes after climbing a mountain all day. “No service?”  
Zach laughed. “You must be Tom,” he said. “Rachel has told us all about you. Mostly nice things. Thanks for making the trip. Did you bring the cranberry sauce?”  
“In the cooler,” Rachel replied as I tried to wrap my head around sleeping somewhere without cell service. I'd even gotten a signal on top of the goddamn mountain! I fiddled with my phone and sure enough, no bars. “I can't wait until Thursday. You're going to love it. Tom makes it himself, with real cranberries. None of that canned shit.”  
“It's a simple recipe,” I said as I climbed on top of the picnic table, holding my phone as far up as I was able. “No biggie.”  
“You have the turkey?” Rachel asked.  
“Fifteen-pounder, doing a four-day brine in my fridge at home. I'll start to pre-cook it on Thursday, and then bring it out here to finish off over the fire.”   
“Sounds good,” I said, hopping off the picnic table and only twisting my ankle a little bit. “So what tree do we tie our food to so bears don't eat it?”  
Zach and Rachel laughed at me, despite my very reasonable question.   
“We're just going to keep it in the locked car in the cooler, Tom,” Rachel said. “We aren't backpacking in the mountains.”  
“Then what do you call what we just did?”  
“A day hike.”  
“With backpacks. In the mountains.”  
She patted my arm pityingly. “You will learn one day. Until then, help me set up the tent.”

It turns out that tents are evil and complicated and I am useless. My brain is very good at putting together tiny computer chips and running through efficient setups of CPUs that maximize power output without overheating, but figuring out how to put together anything over two feet high is beyond me.  
So I mostly just held things up for Rachel while she put them together. I was kind of a glorified coat stand.  
By the time we'd gotten the tent finished, everyone else had arrived. I recognized Tara from the times she had come to visit Rachel on campus, and Zach stuck out to me because I recognized him from the thirst-scrolling Rachel had done through his Instagram, but the rest sort of blended together because I'm bad with names.   
They were a group of kinda granola 20-year-olds, all of whom looked very fit and very able to fight a bear if they had to. I was just glad that I was the kind of out-of-shape where you're scrawny instead of pudgy, because it made me look a little bit more like I fit in. Although they were all wearing this athletic gear, probably called something like Hydro-Tek and designed to keep your body at optimum survival temperatures and also repel mosquitoes, while I was wearing a T-shirt from Darien Lake theme park (from that awkward time when it wasn't a Six Flags and wasn't allowed to put any WB characters on its merch) and basketball shorts that I hope no one recognized were Rachel's.  
The afternoon camping started out fun, though. We got a fire going and roasted some corn and hot dogs, and I learned that it's really fun to find twigs and throw them into a fire. It's also really fun to make s'mores.  
“See, I told you microwave s'mores aren't real s'mores,” Rachel said to me as I stuffed my mouth with my seventh one because it turns out hiking all day makes you really, really hungry.  
“Mmf mma ffmm,” I responded, mouth too full of marshmallows to give her a real response to her second “I told you so” of the day.   
“Hey how'd you like your first summit, Tom?” asked a redheaded girl who was either Tara's cousin or girlfriend, and I wasn't brave enough to ask which one.   
I swallowed my s'more and smiled, hoping my mouth wasn't too coated in chocolate and crumbs. “Really good,” I told her, bringing out my phone to show her the panorama.   
“Ooh, Mount Marcy,” the girl said, apparently identifying the mountain just from the view I showed her. “That's a good one. Rachel has good taste. You're going to have fun this week.”  
“I think she's planning to kill me with exhaustion,” I said. “That way she'll have our dorm to herself and get A's for the rest of the year.”  
“I hadn't thought of that,” Rachel said, scratching her chin. “Could be good for bringing up my GPA.”  
“Don't even think of it,” I said, sticking another marshmallow on the end of my roasting stick. “If I think you're going to try and kill me in the nighttime and blame it on cougars, I will scream. I will scream so loud that all of the bears will hear me and converge on you.”  
Everyone laughed, and I'm pretty sure they were only laughing at me a little bit.   
“You're at fifteen percent,” the redhead said, handing me back my phone.   
“It's okay,” I said. “Not like I get a signal out here. I'll charge it in the car tomorrow.”  
“Won't you need it for an alarm?”  
“Not a chance!” Rachel said, side-hugging me and smiling an evil smile. “I'm the one who gets to decide how to wake him up early. Maybe dump some creek water on him, maybe put a centipede in his ear... It'll be vicious.”   
“You laugh now,” I told her. “But someday I'll take you to Buffalo and you'll have to figure out the bus schedules, and you'll know what true horror is.”   
She laughed and turned her attentions to Zach, who was sitting next to her, and I was allowed to lapse back into that silence of being not quite in the friend group, and everyone else has started a conversation with someone they've known since third grade. It was okay, it gave me plenty of time to throw small sticks and leaves into the fire and watch them slowly ignite and turn to burning ember.  
But it also gave me time to notice how the vibrant fall colors around me had faded in the growing dusk, turning to dark greys and blacks as the night turned into an almost physical force at my back. The fire gave us light and heat, but I could feel the cold press of darkness at my back, and the weight of all the things that could be in that darkness.  
At first, my mind swam with all the animals I'd been thinking about all day. Bears, mountain lions, rattlesnakes. But these fears felt far away – belonging to the woods of the daytime, where they blended into the mundane nature. The woods of night felt very far from mundane. There was something supernatural about them. Something tall and spindly and grabby and evil.   
I tried to reassure myself as I felt the idle chatter of my campmates seemed to sound farther away, like I was listening to them underwater.   
We're on private property, I told myself. There's no mental institution or prison nearby. No one was murdered here. There's no legends of wendigos or ghosts. It's just us for miles around.  
Somehow, that didn't make me feel any better. I tried to focus on the soreness in my legs that was starting to settle in – an entirely expected and average pain. I tried to listen to the excited chatter about our upcoming Thanksgiving feast, and the homemade food everyone was bringing. I tried to think about how Rachel was going to take me to Mount Jo tomorrow – an easy hike that she promised we would finish before noon, and then she was going to take me to Lake Placid to the Olympic Center where the miracle on ice happened.  
You're okay, I told myself again, and actually felt my heart slow down. There's no one here but us.  
“Hey,” said a voice behind me. “You mind if we join you guys?” 

Note: Hello! I've never posted a story on this site before, and am pretty technically-impaired. If there's anything I can do format-wise to make this easier to read, please let me know!


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